Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  On our journey we passed through Druze towns and villages dotting the hillsides. The houses were large, some huge, and yet were used only as summer homes by wealthy Druze émigrés. Hassan told me that of the six thousand residents of his home village, between twenty and twenty-five had over $100 million each. Much of this wealth was the result of successful business ventures abroad, especially in West Africa. Many Druze villages had become ghost towns, with maybe only a third of the houses actually inhabited year-round. When we passed a village that was near Hassan’s own, I asked whether there had been many killed there during the years of violence. Thirteen, he said: five when the village was bombed by Israel, the others killed at checkpoints when their ID cards showed them to be Druze. “It was a horrible war.” When had it stopped? I asked. “It hasn’t,” he told me. “It’s still going on.”

  The “tomb” of the Prophet Job, in Lebanon’s Shouf Mountains, is a holy site for the country’s 250,000 Druze. Since they believe in reincarnation, however, they consider it a cenotaph. Photo by the author

  When the civil war began, the Shouf Mountains saw some vicious fighting between the Druze and their Christian neighbors, who had been brought here by Druze rulers as tenant farmers in the seventeenth century. The Druze eventually gained the upper hand and cleared Christians from parts of the Shouf (though Jumblatt has recently encouraged them to return). Later in the war, the Druze were more often battling the Shi’a militias whose heartland was to their south. After the civil war was resolved in 1989, tension between Druze and Shi’a occasionally resurfaced. The worst single incident came in May 2008, when Hizbullah shelled Druze in the Shouf and took control of two strategically located Druze villages. In the ensuing fighting, the Druze resumed a trademark method of killing their enemies—cutting throats. Advisers to Jumblatt and Arslan later told the US ambassador (in conversations eventually published by Wikileaks) that the Druze were living in a “sea of Shi’a” and feared Shi’a vengeance. The events of 2008 served as an example of how communal violence could reemerge in Lebanon without notice, since there was no effective central authority that could resolve disputes: Lebanon’s government is itself hostage to the same tensions. “We are a small people,” was a refrain that I heard often in the Shouf hills.

  —————

  Once it had been different. Fakhreddin, the preeminent Druze feudal lord in the early seventeenth century, carved out of the Ottoman domain a territory that was essentially independent, and whose borders were close to those of modern Lebanon. Fakhreddin is a figure of national importance: he gives Lebanon a native founder and a historical legitimacy in the face of those who say that the country was a creation of the French colonial powers in 1926. The Ottoman Turkish army eventually brought his independent statelet to an end. Hassan took me to a ruined fortress at the top of a tall cliff on the southern edge of the Shouf. Only fragments remained of a great castle that had once stood there, commanding the plain below. This, too, had been one of Fakhreddin’s castles. “The Turks surrounded this place,” Hassan said, “but Fakhreddin would not give up. He carried on resisting. And then the Turks poisoned the springs from where the castle got all its water. But even then he refused to surrender. I’ll tell you what he did. He blindfolded himself and his horse, and together they jumped off this cliff so that he would not be caught.” I looked down. The fall must have been a hundred feet or so. Hassan had walked back to the spot where the poisoned spring had been. Now there was only dampness underfoot. But for him it seemed almost sacred ground. Here was where a great Druze hero had been brought low. “Forgotten kingdoms?” said Hassan when I told him my book’s title. “We have not forgotten.”

  Fakhreddin’s story is a myth, symbolizing Druze courage. He was in fact caught and put to death by the Turks. After him various other families competed to be preeminent among the Druze. Today’s winners, the Jumblatts, have been living in a castle at Moukhtara since the eighteenth century. In 1853 the castle was visited by the English peer Lord Carnarvon (whose son would later fund the Tutankhamun expedition). The British had discovered in the 1840s that the Druze were a minority community in need of a sponsor, and had decided to fill that role. Carnarvon, who was on his way to becoming a senior British statesman, wanted to make the acquaintance of his nation’s latest allies. Carnarvon’s own stately home in England was itself fairly imposing—in recent years it has featured as Downton Abbey in the TV show of that name. Even so, he seems to have been greatly impressed by Moukhtara, which he described in a book published a few years later. Its finest scene is an account of a medieval-style joust held in the castle courtyard: “The cavaliers of the maidan in their gay colours, the ‘varlets’ standing by the horses and handing fresh spears to the riders, the shouts of approval which hailed each fortunate stroke, the ladies on the battlements . . . the armed and haughty crowd . . . the square towers rising from the long sweep of wall on every side.”

  Carnarvon was certain that he had visited a relic of the Middle Ages that would not long survive. Even as he remembers the carnival of Moukhtara, he writes elegiacally of the Druze’s “picturesque and feudal independence . . . which is possibly now doomed to extinction in the mountains in Syria.” The Druze have outlasted that prediction, in part owing to the support of Carnarvon and others. In the 1860s Druze communities wrote in a collective petition to the British that “we Druses have, after God, no other protector than the British Government.” The belief even spread among the Druze that they were British by origin, or at least that they and the British shared a common ancestry. Some Druze believed this as late as the early twentieth century, and Druze leaders apparently still sometimes ask the British for aid. When I later met one of the most senior of Druze sheikhs, Abu Mohammed Jawad, as he lay on his deathbed in a simple cottage—where homemade confectionery sat on a cart ready to be served to guests—the one thing he had the strength to utter was a reference to this old and curious alliance.

  The pro-Druze policy may have seemed a surprising one for a Christian country to adopt, since one of the principal enemies of the Druze at the time were the Maronite Christians. In the eyes of the British, however, the Maronites’ Christianity was far less important than the fact that they were backed by the French. There was another reason the British favored the Druze, though, a wonderful find for a conspiracy theorist. Among all the colorful theories about the origins of the Druze—as well as their putative British ancestry, they were said to be descended from a French count called Dreux, or, according to the Russian theosophist Madame Blavatsky, from Tibetan lamas—the most intriguing suggestion of all is in a volume deep in the London Library, dating from 1891. The book contains the proceedings of a Masonic lodge called Quatuor Coronati. Its first article, by Brother the Reverend Haskett Smith, argues “that, to this very day, the Druses retain many evident tokens of their close and intimate connection with the Ancient Craft of Freemasonry.”

  The Freemasons believed that they carried on the traditions of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple. Brother Haskett thought that the Druze were the real thing—the masons’ actual descendants—and he was determined to prove it. He spent several weeks in Lebanon, living among the Druze and trying out a simple test. The Freemasons believe that the code words they use were handed down from the builders of the Temple; Brother Haskett thus assumed that the Druze must know the same words. But since he had great difficulty penetrating their wall of secrecy—as he ruefully recounted, each time he asked them about their beliefs, “the whole subject is adroitly turned”—he realized he would have to overcome their secrecy with guile.

  He summons up, perhaps sincerely, a fascinatingly bizarre image for us: “I have made many attempts to gain the ear of a Druse by words, mysteriously whispered, as a dramatic theatrical aside, solemnly pronounced, or casually uttered when the Druse would be least on his guard.” This made me imagine a scholarly English cleric in his dog collar trying to surprise tough and wizened Druze farmers by coming up behind them and
shouting words in ancient Hebrew. If the Druze knew the words, they nevertheless maintained their aplomb, for Brother Haskett never found proof of his theory. He presented it to his fellow Freemasons nonetheless, as the 1891 record shows—noting their skepticism as it does so. One of Brother Haskett’s audience, indignant that his movement should be regarded as a mere offshoot and a Middle Eastern community presented as the original, claimed that the Druze must simply have borrowed their customs from the Freemasons. (In fact, the historian Philip Hitti claimed that the Knights Templar, whom Freemasons have attempted to imitate, might have been influenced by the Druze “organization and teaching.” The concept of the self-denying, austere warrior-monk is one that the Templars and Druze shared, although there is not much evidence of philosophical ideas that they held in common.)

  British war artist Anthony Gross painted this depiction of Druze religious leaders (seated in the circle, at center) accompanied by members of the British Druze Cavalry Regiment in 1942, during World War II. The Druze had a friendship with the British dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, though in fact this Druze regiment had been deployed by the Vichy French against the British before being won over to the British side. Image courtesy Anthony Gross/Imperial War Museum

  Whatever the reason for the cultural similarities between the two groups, a Freemason such as Carnarvon certainly would have spotted the resemblance. There is more than dispassionate observation in his description of the ascent of the Druze toward the higher secrets of the faith: “Gradually—very gradually—he is permitted to draw aside the successive veils which shroud the great secret . . . he is learning only to unlearn; he makes, and he treads on the ruins of his former belief: slowly, painfully, dizzily, he mounts each successive degree of initiation . . . and—as if to mock the hope of all return—at each stride he hears the step on which he last trod crumble and crash into the measureless abyss that rolls below him. Few indeed scale these mysterious heights.”

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  How many secrets would I learn, I wondered, at the Jumblatt castle? As Hassan drove me up toward it, he slowed to a more reverent speed. I noticed a simple stone up ahead, by the roadside. “It is a memorial to Kamal Bek,” said Hassan, referring to Kamal Jumblatt, Walid’s father (“Bek” is an honorific). The car stopped. “He was killed just here,” Hassan said, and sat behind the steering wheel without moving, looking at the stone. Hassan could only have been a child at the time, but his tone and manner suggested that he had witnessed the scene that he was describing. “He only had one bodyguard, and his car was coming the same way we are heading now. Another car came in the other direction.” I looked ahead, toward the next hairpin bend, where the road curved upward. “From there,” Hassan said. “There was a group of men in the car and they opened fire and killed him.” He would not say who was responsible, but it is widely accepted that the attack was arranged by Syrian president Hafez al-Assad to punish Jumblatt for rejecting a Syrian-brokered peace deal intended to end the Lebanese civil war on terms Jumblatt found unacceptable. Hassan sighed. Another Druze hero had fallen.

  He restarted the car and we climbed the last few hundred yards to Moukhtara village. Here I finally caught my first glimpse of Walid Jumblatt’s castle. A huge building in honey-colored stone, it dominated the hairdresser’s and grocery store and well-kept gardens of the hillside settlement. After dropping my bags at an outbuilding, I made my way to its gatehouse, where bodyguards sat chatting and drinking coffee in front of an old cupboard with a grimy glass door through which I spotted a selection of rifles and what looked like a rocket launcher.

  Finally a familiar character with wild white hair came into view: Walid Jumblatt was here to collect me, his dog bounding along behind him. I avoided trying to ask him again about the Druze religion for the time being, and instead admiringly toured his ancestral home. The castle was built in what could be called the Lebanese classical style: a red tiled roof, patches of red and orange coloring on the walls, pointed arches between thin columns and a lantern hanging from the tip of each point. In the courtyard—perhaps the same place where Carnarvon had seen the jousting—there were fountains, pediments above the windows, and a Roman sarcophagus decorated with scenes of Bacchus dancing among grapes. The interior rooms were more lavish: huge marble floors, fountains, Damascene carved ceilings. A massive painting of the siege of Leningrad, a gift from the Soviet Union, was a sign of where the Druze had turned when British support ran dry.

  Over dinner I tried him again on Druze religion, and he promised to introduce me to some of the clergy. But he preferred to talk about politics. Syria was descending into civil war, and the Druze there would have to take sides: to his embarrassment, he said over glasses of vodka and cups of steaming black coffee, there were many who wanted to back Assad. I asked how the Druze had ended up in Syria in the first place, and he told me that they had been forced to flee there in 1711 as a result of an internal battle among the Druze themselves, between two groups called Qaysis and Yemenis. The Yemenis had been driven out east, into what later became Syria. Their descendants are now the world’s largest Druze community; most of them live on a basalt plateau called the Druze Mountain. The Druze in Israel (now numbering a little over 120,000) were separated from their brethren in Lebanon when national borders were imposed on the region after World War I.

  The next day Walid Jumblatt fulfilled his promise and took me to meet the uqqal at a lunch in a garden higher up the hillside. He drove the car, rather to my surprise: wasn’t he worried that what had happened to his father might happen to him, too? “It’s down to fate,” he said. A belief that certain events are destined to happen and cannot be avoided is common in the Middle East (and it is an old one; Babylonian astrology rests on this belief that human affairs are fore-ordained). It was an uneventful journey, except for people waving at Jumblatt in the one village through which we passed. When we reached the garden where the lunch was being held, it was like encountering an ocean of white fezzes and black cloaks: there were upward of a hundred sheikhs seated at the long tables, contemplating huge dishes of lamb and rice. The host, Sheikh Ali, came to greet us. He was an enormously jolly and rotund man, who in his nineteenth-century Druze dress of black baggy trousers and Ottoman fez looked like a pasha out of a 1930s film about the Orient. He was especially talented, I was told, at arranging picnics. I could believe it. Touring his house after the meal, though, I saw photographs on his living room wall that showed another side of the sheikh. They were from the early 1980s, when the civil war was just beginning, and showed a young Sheikh Ali training cadets for battle. In those times, the crisis was so great that the sheikhs had to fight despite their commitment to asceticism.

  The sheikhs were keen to explain that this was not a normal practice—ordinarily they scrupulously avoid involving themselves in conflict of any kind. “We sheikhs are in the service of people,” said Sheikh Ali, “maintaining customs that keep the sect going, preserve the Druze honor, and prevent social ills.” But when Druze honor was at stake, he added, everything was permitted: “Yes, everyone in time of war must turn out, and fight with sticks if need be. Our community comes alive in war; it’s in peacetime that we get fed up.” The small group of young men gathered around the sheikh laughed in agreement. Sheikh Ali explained that his reference to sticks was meant seriously: that was how the Druze had fought the French in the 1920s, overcoming armed soldiers with swords, sticks, and stones before seizing their weapons and starting a full-scale insurrection. It all began because the French had arrested a guest of the local Druze chieftain, which the Druze considered to be an insult to their honor.

  Another sheikh, blind in one eye, talked to me about the Greek philosophers. He told me how during the eleventh century, in a brilliant piece of polemic, the Muslim scholar al-Ghazali argued that philosophy was self-contradictory. It could not explain God and therefore could only lead those who studied it to skepticism. Al-Ghazali led the intellectual charge against the Gree
ks, and orthodox Sunni Islam gradually stopped taking inspiration from the philosophy of others. The Druze, though, isolated in their mountain villages and already determinedly unorthodox, were untouched by al-Ghazali. They continued to revere Plato, Pythagoras, and Aristotle.

  After the lunch, back at Moukhtara, I wandered through alleyways and down stairs littered with oranges freshly fallen from trees. I passed a church, but its one tiny door was shut. Nearby there was a small restaurant where I sat writing for a while before a cheerful group of young men sitting at the next table invited me to join them for arak. They offered me hummus and fattoush. “We wish we could give you our local dish,” they said. “There are little pigs in the hills that people shoot, and cook them in red wine. But it’s not the season.” There is no dish that could be more forbidden in Islam than pork cooked in wine. I knew they must be juhhal, the uninitiated Druze who are not bound by any religious laws governing food.

  “Tell us what you think about reincarnation,” they said. “Do you believe in it?” I tried to answer tactfully, but this wasn’t enough for them. “No, it’s real,” one of them said. “We have proof.” Another piped up: “My cousin could speak as a child in words that an ordinary person could not say, could do things that were remarkable for her age.” Another told a story of a man who remembered that he had been killed on his wedding day and who was able to draw pictures of the dresses the women in attendance had worn. He even met the man who had killed his former self, and forgave him.

  Later that day I met a woman who had changed her name because of a dream in which she was living in America. After considering the dream, her family decided that she was the reincarnation of a Druze girl who had gone to live there and had died young. That girl’s name had been Carmen, so she was renamed Karima in honor of her dead self. The belief in reincarnation is so widespread, a Druze friend later told me, that a boy who appeared to have knowledge of the life of a man who had died around the same time the boy was born was accepted as the new incarnation of the dead man’s soul and was trusted by the dead man’s children to divide up their inheritance.